SIMON LAMBERT: Islington Council's £96-a-year diesel tax on the cars it encouraged people to buy

Is it acceptable to spend eight years encouraging people to do something, then stage a U-turn and tax them for following your suggestion?

Islington Council thinks it is. After pushing people to buy diesel cars since 2007 with its emission-based residents parking permit system, it has now whacked them with an extra £96-a-year charge for doing what it wanted.

This will at least double the cost of parking outside their house for many diesel car owners and is the equivalent of Islington hiking its element of Band D council tax by 10%.

The Labour-run council has called it a diesel surcharge, but let’s be honest it’s a diesel tax.

Not good for you any more: Islington has done a U-turn and decided it will tax diesel cars £96-a-year extra

I should declare my hand here. I am an Islington resident and I have a diesel car, yet my objection to this runs far deeper than personal interest.

This is a tax that is deeply regressive.

Not only does it hit lower income residents harder, but they are also far less likely to be able to afford to go out and buy a different car to avoid it.

The Labour party's buzz phrase in recent years has been the cost of living crisis, I would imagine all its struggling voters in Islington are delighted the council is doing its bit to ease that by taxing them £96 extra each year.

If you are wealthy - or have the luxury of a company car - you can switch to the new breed of low CO2 petrol cars, which is what Islington Council is now telling people it wants them to do.

Many with less money will not have the luxury of that option and feel they have no choice but to line the council's coffers with a new tax that it failed to consult its residents on.

Islington says this is needed to encourage people away from polluting cars - and that while diesel cars score better on CO2, they are more harmful for other pollutants.

Yet the council itself wanted people to buy those very diesel cars.

Islington’s justification conveniently ignores how a similar effect could have been achieved by cutting existing parking permit charges to make petrol cars cheaper - nudging people away from diesels without hitting much harder them in the pocket.

There’s certainly room to. Residents parking permit charges are a colossal rip-off, especially when you remember this is a scheme supposedly run for their benefit. Take a look at the hefty annual charges in the table below taken from Islington's website.

Once residents parking is set up it costs hardly anything to run - and councils make a tidy sum from issuing parking tickets anyway.

Since they were handed the keys to the bandwagon, parking enforcement has become a major cash cow for councils. Legally they have to use the surplus on traffic and street-related projects.

Yet a cynic would point out that if a council comfortably knows it will run a surplus year-in, year-out it can then direct its normal traffic and street funding away to other places.

That same cynic may also point out that it is rather convenient that Islington has sought to bring in the diesel tax as it faces yet more cuts to its central government funding. They might argue that the environmental benefits cited are 'greenwash'.

Whatever you judge its motives to be, the most recent publicised figures reveal Islington made a profit of £6.7m from parking and traffic fines in 2012/13.

The documents proposing the new diesel tax suggest it will deliver an extra £1m a year.

Sadly, in Islington that bumper parking profit meant to go on traffic and streets doesn’t amount to actually bothering to fix the borough’s crumbling roads and pavements.

As a cyclist I get a close up view of the pothole ridden streets and they are appalling. The cracked and uneven pavements are pretty terrible too.

What Islington does excel at is dreaming up daft, unnecessary and badly implemented traffic schemes. The table below from its website details how it spent its £6.7m surplus.

It appears from looking at the categories that more goes on general meddling than anything else

Some would argue that it is not up to our councils to decide what’s good and bad for people and that they should stick to keeping our local areas up to scratch and delivering essential services.

Islington Council obviously disagrees with that theory. It is a big fan of telling its residents how they should be living their lives and generates a healthy amount of propaganda.

Yet to tell someone to do something and then suddenly tax them extra for it is wrong. Islington’s leaders should be deeply embarrassed.

With behaviour like this, is it any wonder people have so little faith in their councils?

Despite all the complaints from independent shopkeepers that they are harming town centres - and helping the retail giants - and all the anger from residents, our councils push on relentlessly with heavy-handed parking enforcement.

The irony is that underneath all this lies a real issue with council funding in this country.

Local authorities face huge cuts, have little local revenue-raising power and must pass almost all council tax over to the Government for it to be redistributed. They are genuinely struggling to provide all the things people expect from them.

Sadly, actions such as Islington’s diesel tax simply undermine their opportunity to put their case forward.